[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

related terms. Your librarian will help you individually, or run workshops, on
making the most of online searches and this is a skill worth practising. If you
102 Studying English Literature
were working on the question above about representations of rural and urban
life in contemporary Britain, typing in  godlessness or  ancient civilisations
would result in far too many hits that are irrelevant to the precise context in
which you are considering them. It would be far better to type in the titles of
the contemporary texts, their authors or film directors, and then once within a
relevant document to insert words related to the city, sexuality and religion,
etc. There will always be a certain amount of trial and error in this process and
you should be prepared to spend some time investigating all possibilities.
(This can be an enjoyable and enlightening experience in itself; certainly the
more you do it, the more likely you are to search with accuracy.) The same
process applies to searching the library catalogue, or the contents page or
index of a book you ve picked up. Of course, the more well-known the author
the more selective you will have to be. If you are researching a topic for a
module on Shakespeare the resources will be endless, so you ll need to ascer-
tain your key topic words with greater precision, while looking for articles on
the forgotten modernist Hope Mirrlees will only result in one or two results
and thus you d expect to read them all.
Skim read Browsing in the library in this way is one occasion when the
ability to skim read is an advantage. Skim reading your key texts is not advised,
as you will miss the nuances that precisely enable you to understand how it
makes its points, but glancing superficially over pages of a secondary text to
pick out relevant information, and, indeed, discover whether the text is useful
at all, will save you a lot of time. There is no need to feel obliged to stick with a
book, even if you found some of it to be relevant. Be ruthless and stop reading
once its discourse strays from your topic.
Note When you have found a relevant article, passage or chapter from a book,
it is still a good idea to make notes from it rather than just photocopy or
download it. Owning a copy of the complete text is like owning the transcript
of a lecture; it is still a dense mass of information that requires careful sifting for
gems. The danger of possessing the whole text is that you feel that your work
is done, rather than still waiting to be done.
4.7 Making a plan
Now you have lots of notes from your lectures, your close rereadings, and your
secondary research. (It might be an advantage at this stage to have made them
on loose leaves of paper rather than in a bound notebook, so you can shuffle
them around and place them all in front of you on the table, or even the floor.)
Essays 103
You should arm yourself with blank sheets of paper and coloured pens in order
to visualise the points of similarity and difference, support and opposition, for
the case you hope to make. However wedded you may be to your computer, it
really is a good idea to work with pen and paper at this stage because you are
aiming to make all sorts of links and connections that can be indicated
through arrows and bubbles that are free to loop around your page, in multiple
directions if necessary. You want your ideas to flow rather than be constrained
by the linear logic of the word-processor.
The first thing to do is to review the claims you made after constructing your
Venn diagram. Have they gained credibility or been refuted by the reading
you ve completed subsequently? Don t worry if the answer to this question is
not straightforward. When we considered argument in chapter 3 we favoured
the kind of dialogic approach considered by Bakhtin, which means that regard-
less of the manner in which a question may be phrased (demanding a yes or no
answer), for most questions around literature, any response may be more con-
tingent (by which I mean it is dependent upon the critical perspectives you have
taken and the texts you have read, etc.). Now you should attempt to visualise
your findings through a diagram once more, this time one that will have a more
complicated and unique structure.
grounds (the evidence from your Venn) ’! claim ’! support
(from further reading)
“!
rebuttal (from further reading) ’! new claim
This is an imagined segment of what could be a huge chart. Remember, at the
moment, you are only roughing out ideas, your final essay plan will emerge from
these trains of thought but you do not need to record them in the sequence in
which you hope to write your final essay. This is more of a brainstorming [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • alwayshope.keep.pl

    •